 Hi, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here at AT&T Park on the ground getting all the innovation stories with SiliconANGLE. We are Russ Stanley, Managing Vice President for Ticket Sales. Welcome to SiliconANGLE's conversation. Thank you. So what about the tickets? Everyone wants a ticket. I want a better seat. Is it a sellout? How do we know it's a sellout? You guys have an amazing stadium, great fan base. Tickets are a big part of it. What are you guys using technology for with tickets? To be honest with you, we've had a great run. The team has played well. We've won two World Series in four years. And what that's helped us do is solidify the season ticket base. So we have a season base of 30,000 full season tickets. So before we play a game, three quarters of our tickets are already gone. So that certainly puts you in a position where getting to a sellout and pricing and marketing your tickets to a sellout, it's a little easier than most parks. Our last 12,000 tickets, it's a combination of groups, special events, single game tickets. And there's a number of levers that we pull to try to manage to a sellout every night. And it's pretty complicated. I mean, we spend a lot of time on it. With dynamic pricing, if we have a game where it's really taken off, we might raise prices or if it's softening, heading into a game, we may lower prices to hit the right market price. Certainly a lot of the apps out there have those kind of features you're seeing for concerts as well. But as for a fan, what do they need to know? A lot of times fans will say, well, they're selling out every game. Maybe I won't come to the stadium. But in fact, that's not the case. You guys actually have some tickets on game day that are flowing, right? We do. And it's very common to be able to walk up to the window and purchase a ticket. We have holds for players, home and visitors. There's some marketing holds, umpires. And a lot of times those will come back on the day of the game. You have to protect them. You have to deliver them. But if a team comes in and uses 100 tickets, all of a sudden we've got 100 tickets that go to the window. And those have to be priced properly on the day of the game because that might be different than what the market would bear two weeks ago. The Uber is a real popular company. They have surge pricing that's controversial. How is that with you guys? I mean, you guys have that kind of model because obviously hit the playoff time, you know, certainly you see the prices go up. Sure. And with 30,000 tickets, immediately you have a built-in demand. You know, you have such a limited supply that, you know, and you have a good demand, it really takes off. So we're heading, we are, you know, talking about doing our post-season pricing. And for season tickets, you know, we try to be aggressive on the lower side to make sure the season ticket holders get the best possible price. And then once we roll out with individual prices and we'll see what the activity is, and typically it's, you know, for a post-season game it's really strong. Is there a secret sauce to the algorithm? You know, I'm not allowed to say it's, there is some secret to it, but a lot of it is what you would, where you'd already know is ticket sales from yesterday, what team the play, what place the team is in, what place the opponent's in, who's pitching, is there a giveaway, are we doing fireworks, I mean, all of those impact our prices. And you're optimizing really for fan access, getting tickets at the right price at the right game, right? Exactly. And if you can match that, ultimately what happens is you sell out every game. It's not easy, but... Well, you guys do a lot of sell-outs. Talk about, like, what you guys see right now in terms of future innovations. Obviously, apps are out there right now, a lot of different outlets for buying tickets. You can go direct, you can go online, a lot of apps. What innovations are you guys looking at now to continue that exploration for the fans? One of the real pushes that we're getting, you know, other teams are doing, and we're trying to see what they're doing to learn from them, but this whole idea of going ticketless, you know, the Dodgers went completely ticketless this year. So, all your tickets are on your phone or on your card, so I want to spend some time looking at that, but that's something we're probably going to research heavily this year. You don't have to pay the bridge. You don't need to pay the toll anymore. You just go right through. The day the fans can just walk in and get billed. Sure. And eventually that could happen. I mean, you're actually seeing it now with being able to move tickets on your phone, you know, from one person to another. If I'm running late, you just move the ticket to my phone. You go in. Russ, share with the folks at home who are watching. What has been the big thing from your perspective that's changed over the past 10 years in terms of ballgames and tickets and fan experience? What has been the big thing that they may not know that you've seen? Well, I think that major changes in ticketing have been secondary market. The fact that you now do it from the comfort of your bedroom, you know, you're not in a van on the parking lot reselling your tickets. You can do it from your home. I think that was a major change, and I think dynamic pricing is another one. One of the things we started this year was that we're allowing season ticket holders to give us tickets. Because we're in a sellout mentality, we don't have tickets. We have a seat upgrade program. What we're finding is there are no seats for people to upgrade to because we were sold out. So what we did was develop a consignment program where a customer can give us their ticket back. If they're not going to use it on a particular day and we can repurpose it for them, we'll give them 50% of their purchase price back. That's fantastic value for the customer. So it's given us an opportunity to allow people who maybe can't come to the game to get something for the ticket so they're not losing, but also someone who's at the game that wants to move down into their seat and sit in a different seat. And I think that, you know, we talk about apps and things. I think our seat upgrade program is a good one. In the old days, we just walked down and sit in the seats until we got kicked out. Yeah, we call it, it's now electronic poaching. That's great. So tell us about the fans about the sellout concept. You guys sell out a lot of games, but you kind of wait to announce that. How does that work in terms of the actual sellout announcement? Really, the way our tickets sell, most games don't sell out until game day or even, you know, sometimes at game time. They're days that we may sweat it all the way to the end. But most of them, you know, there's always tickets kind of moving around. It's funny, you know, you're releasing tickets, maybe a group didn't buy all the tickets and so there's always tickets kind of floating. So on the day of the game, you know, we clean that up and by the time the game starts, usually, you know, a couple hundred tickets have been sold. Russ, thanks for joining us on theCUBE here, getting the inside action on another pricing works on tickets, the sellouts. Thanks for the time. This is theCUBE. We are here at AT&T Park, getting all the actions at Cubum. John Furrier, thanks for watching.